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Lord Of The Rings - Oscars, We Loves Them
Suhas writes "The New Zealand Herald and many others such as Yahoo/AP are reporting that Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King has swept the Oscars by winning in all the 11 categories it was nominated in. Good to see Peter Jackson finally got the Best Director award! The official Oscar site has a full list of the winners."
This is great to see a fantasy film get the recognition it deserves...a masterful film, even if I actually didn't care for it :)
Bohoo ...... Why wasnt it nominated for best cinematography ??? I havnt seen better cinematography before.
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It is interesting to see a movie that contains a leat one digital artifact in every shot or sequence simply overwhelm the awards. When will we see the effects groups have a category?
Oh yes, Bill Murray should have one for best actor. No doubt.
Maybe Peter Jackson will have some encouragement (not to mention financial backing) to do the Hobbit now. Given what they pulled off with Gollum, I'd like to see what Smaug would look like...that would be awesome.
Reading the series has forever been on my "to do" list but I never have. I enthusiastically sat through the first two movies, but half way through the third I thought to myself "something just isn't clicking here." Upon rewatching the first two movies, I have to say, now that the "oh wow" factor of big monsters fighting on beautiful scenery has worn off, I really didn't like these films.
And I think the reason is this: the characters do not interact with each other, and are for the most part not interesting. There's a tedious romance encountered entirely via flashback and voiceover. There's an INCREADIBLY obvious and overstated (again and again and again) little rivalry with Sam and Gollum for Frodo's attention. Aside from that the characters really have no relation to one another, they just wander together, and by the end we learn (but never really see) that they've all become the best of pals. Even more eggregious, the bad guys have no direct connection to the good guys. No character has a personal stake in what he's working toward. They're just bad, and the fellowship is working against them because they're the heroes. No further explanation is really provided.
Upon watching the third movie I realized that maybe Aragorn was reclaiming some sort of birthright or something, but why this is a really big deal (aside from the movie's vauge assertion that kings are better than other forms of leadership) is beyond me. The rest of the characters either literally wandered onto the screen with no real explanation (in the case of 3 out of 4 hobbits) and stuck with the quest just because they were nice guys, or showed up already billed as heroes around a table. I never knew who Legolas was and I never really cared.
Boromeir was pretty interesting, and the rivalry/respect he had going with Frodo and Aragorn was the only conflict between individuals that was the least bit interesting in the whole trilogy. Every other time individuals clashed with each other it was the result of an evil mage or something, and there was no ambiguity whatsoever to what was going to happen.
I voiced all of this to a friend of mine and he said that if I read the books, people's motivations would be a little more fleshed out. Sorry, but that just doesn't cut it. I'm watching these movies as movies, and they're too long and don't really make much sense.
They're certainly better than most sci fi blockbusters, I just don't think ROTK was Oscar worthy. They beat the entire Alien series hands- down. They're more consistently entertaining than the old Star Wars and way better than the new one. The first Matrix was a better movie, but the sequels were a mess of "cool" with no logic. Perhaps the fantasy / sci-fi action genre isn't for me, but the movies seem universally poorly written. I don't see why it's so hard to have interesting, believable people interacting with each other inside a fantastic environment.
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This post is from August 25th of 1998, more than five years ago. It's the first mention of the movies being made that I could find on Slashdot. No comments, but it's interesting to realize that tonight's awards ceremony has been the the culmination of a story we've all been following here for more than half a decade.
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Dunno about that bland Annie Lennox song ... A Mighty Wind's At The End of the Rainbow was a much better song, IMO. However in all other respects the film deserved the awards.
... so LOTR:ROTK is the first (to win 11) to win all the awards it was nominated for.
Note: Ben Hur was nominated for 12, and Titanic was nominated for 14
The "fantasy genre" is only as good as its movies. If fantasy movies haven't won in the past, it's because they weren't actually all that good. What others have there been? Star Wars?
Good to see Peter Jackson finally got the Best Director award!
Why? Did you see the other nominated films? By what metric do you determine the 'best director'? If you feel he has been snubbed in the past, that's too bad. The nomination was for this film. (Yes, the voters have frequently righted past wrongs or close calls). A body of work award is typically rewarded specially, and much later in the career.
It's not as if Jackson is particularly old, either. So what is the reasoning behind the 'finally' comment? I just don't see it. There were plenty of good contenders. Nope, it boils down to plain old nerdish fanboyism.
And while I'm burning karma, perhaps the voters were actually thinking of G. Lucas when voting for Jackson. Sure, Jackson pumped out a couple of great movies, did wonders for product management, but Lucas helped define a genre and a generation, both in the insular world of Hollywood and in US culture in general. Yet he's never been 'blessed' by AMPAS, as space opera was too kiddyish. Here's the chance to correct that mistake.
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And yet Tolkien was the one who signed away the movie rights, and even suggested editing changes, such as removing Helm's Deep because it was "unnecessary" to the story. Read his letters sometime.
If Peter Jackson had suggested cutting Helm's Deep, how many of the purists would be saying things like "Tokien would be turning in his grave!" Meanwhile, Tolkien suggested it!
Amusingly, Tolkien was much more liberal about Lord of the Rings than his own fans--he was editing and changing his mythologies up until the very end of his life. He stated several times he would have done things differently had he the chance to write the book over again.
People who quibble because someone said something that someone else said in the books, or the Ents didn't decide to go to war and instead had to be convinced, etc., are UPTIGHT.
Well i'd be happy with anything that wasn't The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I managed to drag myself all the way through the first trilogy and definitely wasn't impressed, but i gave up half-way through the first book of the second trilogy when it became aparent that it was going to be as lackluster as the first trilogy. Covenant was too whiney and annoying to be a good hero, and too pathetic to be a good anti-hero. Of course the fact that the first thing he does is rape a girl because he can't restrain his "manly urges" didn't really endear him to me.
Mirror of Her Dreams on the other hand was very good, wouldn't mind seeing a movie of that one, although there are other books i would nominate first.
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I've seen all the nominated films.
Mystic River and American Splendor were clearly better adaptations than Return. And the Annie Lennox song was crap, and worse, not relevant to the film. The Mighty Wind song, sung on the show in character, was cute, but the Triplets of Belleville theme was the best.
Master and Commander, Lost in Translation, and Mystic River were all better films than Return. Only Seabiscuit was inferior. Of course the wins for Return were for the whole trilogy. Rings as a whole deserves high praise. Master and Commander is a better action/adventure film than Return. It's also far better than Gladiator, the other Crowe genre film that won Best Picture.
As an emsemble film, Return neither received nor deserved any acting nominations.
I'm in complete agreement with the technical awards. Return probably would have won Cinematography if it had been nominated, over the more deserving M&C.
Am I the only one who is sick and tired of the standard "blockbuster" films getting Best Picture while more unique, original (and lower-budget) films get shafted year after year?
Why does LOTR deserve best picture over Master and Commander, Lost in Translation, or dare I say (even though it wasn't nominated) The Last Samurai? Because it had a bigger budget and was hyped more?
I stopped watching or caring about the academy awards when Gladiator (the hyped big-budget movie of 2000) beat Crouching Tiger and Chocolat for best picture. Either of those movies deserved best picture ten times more then Gladiator.
Let the big budget films have best actor/actress if they actually earned it (Crowe did in Gladiator). But it seems like they are automatically destined to get Best Picture -- which annoys the hell out of me. Though I realize I'm in the minority and probably begging to get modded flamebait by speaking out against LOTR on /.
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